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QS (i.e., the Quirky Silliness Ranking) Strikes Again

For 2013, though now one can break out the results, which is revealing. (For past coverage of the Quirky Silliness rankings, do see this--recall this was the company dumped by the Times Higher Education Supplement, for good reason as best I can tell.)

Here are the top 20 U.S. departments according to the "academic reputation" survey they allegedly conduct--they provide no information on how many responses they got, from where, who the evaluators were, etc.--the results are a hodge-podge of "halo effect" of university name (I am told they only ask about university names, not actual faculty lists), occasionally some evidence that the PGR has had some influence, plus peculiarities of the geographic breakdown of the respondents (one suspects a lot of German philosophers responded, given how well German departments do and given which U.S. departments over-performed):

1. University of Pittsburgh (89.1)

2. Princeton University (87.7)

3. New York University (87.3)

4. University of California, Berkeley (82.8)

5. Rutgers University, New Brunswick (82.6)

6. Stanford University (79.4)

7. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (79.1)

8. Columbia University (78.5)

9. Harvard University (73.6)

10. University of Chicago (72.1)

11. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (71.9)

12. Yale University (68.8)

13. University of California, Los Angeles (66.3)

14. Boston University (63.3)

15. Cornell University (61.3)

16. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (60.9)

17. University of Notre Dame (60.3)

18. Brown University (59.0)

19. Northwestern University (58.5)

20. Duke University (57.5)

Results are very different, however, when you look at the U.S. top 20 for citations per paper (alas, no indication of what they treated as the faculty lists or how they determined cites per paper--my suspicion is that in many cases, emeritus faculty were included):

1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick (100.0)

2. University of California, Berkeley (94.0)

3. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (93.8)

4. Princeton University (92.6)

5. University of Arizona (91.8)

6. Stanford University (89.5)

7. University of Wisconsin, Madison (87.5)

8. New York University (86.2)

9. University of Southern California (85.3)

10. Harvard University (84.8)

11. University of Texas, Austin (84.4)

12. University of Pittsburgh (84.1)

13. University of Massachussetts, Amherst (83.6)

14. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (83.5)

15. Brown University (83.3)

16. Northwestern University (82.3)

17. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (81.4)

18. University of California, Riverside (81.0)

19. Syracuse University (79.2)

20. University of Notre Dame (79.1)

And we get yet another set of results from the H-index ranking of faculties: